In June 2013, when David Graham Jones took charge of North Yorkshire Police for the first time, he probably thought that he had ‘landed on his feet’ as we say oop t’North. A rambling, old country hall as HQ, miles from anywhere, it truly is far from the madding crowd
lfordPolicing the genteel and largely rural acres of Harrogate, Ripon and York (the latter two the only cities on his patch) would also be a far cry from his previous career postings in the rough, tough gun-toting, knife-wielding districts of Salford and Belfast.
Add to that a charming, equable and unchallenging employer, in the form of Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) Julia Mulligan, and a Command Team deeply committed to self congratulation and backslapping, and it all must have seemed very agreeable
Top all that off with a largely tame local and regional media and what could possibly go wrong for the Jones boy?
Much has been written elsewhere about the Jimmy Savile and Peter Jaconelli child abuse scandal in the seaside town of Scarborough. In brief, the investigative efforts of two citizen journalists – Tim Hicks and Nigel Ward – led to a BBC Inside Out programme aired in April 2014. It showed NYP in a poor light and Jones didn’t put either himself, or any of his officers, up for interview.
The bottom line is, that without the sterling efforts of Messrs Hicks and Ward, the many victims of the two, now notorious, child sex offenders would have received no recognition, apology or closure. Their reward by North Yorkshire Police? To be hounded through the civil courts for eighteen months.
A Google search of ‘Operation Rome’ and ‘Operation Hyson’ will link to a number of forensic articles I have written about these two disastrous, and very costly, NYP investigations that now span almost five years. They have brought significant reputational damage to both Jones, and his police force .
Much worse publicity is yet to come as Hyson, a civil harassment claim against the two journalists responsible for the exposure of the Savile and Jaconelli scandal, lurches towards a trial at Leeds County Court on 20th July, 2016. Eighteen months to the day since proceedings were issued. The press benches will, no doubt, be overflowing to report on the unfolding proceedings.
Jones, as lead claimant in that civil case, felt it necessary to award himself free legal fees, courtesy of the public purse, before approving the launch of the claim. At a figure currently estimated at £40,000, come the end of the trial. He also authorised two of his very senior officers, Deputy Chief Constable Timothy Madgwick and C/Supt Lisa Winward (pictured below) to access the same legal fees benefit.
On top of that estimated £120,000 diminution of the public purse by three serving police officers, Jones – in a grand gesture of munificence – also granted free access to the public purse to one of his retired police officers, ex Superintendent Heather Pearson and former Police Authority Chair, Jane Kenyon. That leap of faith then takes the bill up to an estimated £200,000.
But Jones didn’t stop there. In the best traditions of past North Yorkshire Police ACPO officers such as Della Cannings, Grahame Maxwell, Dave Collins and Adam Briggs, and their liberal approach to the spending of police funds, he awarded the same amount of free legal fees to four members of the public. Taking the total estimated bill to the North Yorkshire precept payer for the private court claim up to around £350,000.
Curiously, Jones is a leading light in the Chief Police Officers Staff Association (CPOSA) who might, reasonably, have been expected to provide support for one of their members pursuing legal action, rather than Jones using police funds as a personal piggy bank. Jones’ Deputy, Tim Madgwick, is also a CPOSA member. A copy of the CPOSA legal expenses policy can be viewed here. Similarly, Lisa Winward and Heather Pearson are covered by legal expenses insurance as members of the Police Superintendents’ Association of England and Wales (PSAEW). Whilst the insurance is more regularly used as an aid to defending claims against officers, Hyson was grounded, allegedly, in health, safety and welfare issues connected to the police officers.
Even more curiously, Mrs Mulligan (supported by Jones) contemplated embarking on legal action to recover monies from Maxwell and Briggs but abandoned the idea, because it might have cost too much in legal fees (and the Maxwell and Briggs personnel files had reportedly and mysteriously ‘disappeared’). In the context of the huge sum of public money spent on Hyson, and what is likely to be achieved, letting the errant chiefs off the hook looks a very poor judgement call indeed, by comparison.
Put shortly, it was “inappropriate” according to Jones and Mrs Mulligan to chase two former NYP Command Team officers for £100,000 they owe (read more here), but no problem at all to spend around £350,000 of public money hunting down two journalists.
Which makes this joint statement of Chief Constable Jones and PCC Mulligan in the wake of the Maxwell, Briggs farrago sound very hollow indeed: “The commissioner and the chief constable are determined that issues of this kind shall never be allowed to occur again”.
But an issue of exactly that kind has occurred, just over a year after that solemn pronouncement was made – and the two people at the very heart of the scandal – and some of the attempts to conceal it from the public, are the very same Dave Jones and Julia Mulligan.
The unauthorised removal (or theft if you like) of the Briggs and Maxwell personnel files also has a troubling ring to it. Are NYP saying to the wider world that sensitive materials stolen from their own police HQ go completely undetected? This has shades of the Sir Norman Bettison scandal, when renewed allegations of platinum wire theft against the former Merseyside and West Yorkshire Police chief constable (pictured below) could not be progressed, as the original criminal and disciplinary files has ‘disappeared’ from South Yorkshire Police HQ by the time outside investigators were appointed.
Returning to Chief Constable Jones, he made one of his rare public, questions from the floor, appearances in October 2013, alongside Julia Mulligan, at St Joseph’s Theatre in Scarborough. He fielded this polite and seemingly innocuous query from Nigel Ward, who was in the audience:
‘Are we all equal under the law, Dave?’
The response was reported as: ‘I bloody well hope so’.
But what Chief Constable Jones didn’t share with Nigel Ward, or the rest of the Scarborough audience that day, is that he runs a police force that recklessly, relentlessly and calculatingly breaks the law almost every single day. I have spent over a year peering into some of the dark corners of North Yorkshire Police and the issues upon which I can now shine light make for bleak reading:
Freedom of Information Act (FOIA):
Chief Constable Jones is registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office as the data controller for North Yorkshire Police. One of the key requirements in that role is to lawfully dispose of information requests within 20 working days. They catastrophically fail to do so, as the image below graphically depicts.
The situation was unacceptable when Jones arrived at NYP, early in the 2013/14 financial year, but it has plainly got WORSE under his leadership. The Information Commissioner’s office has, allegedly, been ‘monitoring’ the situation for the past five years as a York Evening Press article from 2011 discloses (read in full here).
On NYP’s own website they claim that their philosophy is one of an ‘open and transparent’ approach to disposal of FOIA requests. They further claim that they follow the processes and guidelines set out in the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) FOIA manual. A weblink to the manual is helpfully provided by NYP. Except, I have had to write to NYP’s civil disclosure unit and point out that their link is defective. They have been provided with the correct one (click here). However, my email has not drawn a response at the time of publication and the link has not been repaired.
More crucially, I have read the ACPO guidance and I can find very little corrrelation between how North Yorkshire Police deal with information requests (I have made 19 in the last two years) and what the manual directs them to do. So, not only is the law routinely broken, Jones sticks up two fingers to his fellow chief constables.
The dishonesty doesn’t stop there, either. NYP publish a disclosure log on their website but its usefulness is, actually, very limited because it is apparent that some of the FOIA outcomes that damage the police force’s reputation do not make it onto that log. A classic example being the one revealing the numbers of out of time requests over the past three years. So much then for the ‘open and transparent’ philosophy.
Data Protection Act
As with information requests, so it is with data subject access requests. The Act provides for all personal information to be disclosed from the force’s files.
In the case of my own two subject access requests (SAR’s), NYP have broken the law by failing to dispose of one of them appropriately within the stipulated 40 day period. Even after being given the generous option of a simplified form of response (a schedule of documents held, rather than full disclosure of all of them) what was provided was a deeply unsatisfactory shambles that looks as though it has been put together over a disclosure officer’s lunch break. The schedule arrived on the fortieth day, precluding any possibility of the contemplated inspection of the documents within the statutory period.
The other SAR, concerning my data held by Mrs Mulligan’s PCC office, has still not even been acknowledged, let alone determined. It fell due on 31st May, 2015. NYP are responsible, under a joint corporate services arrangement, for dealing with SAR’s and FOIA requests on behalf of the PCC’s office.
Following this latest breach of the law, a further FOIA request has been submitted to NYP requesting details of how many SAR’s the force have dealt with over the past three years, and how many were properly determined to the requester’s satisfaction within the statutory 40 day period. Full details here.
Many may say, and justifiably so, that catching murderers and organised criminals – and keeping the streets clear of drugs, guns and knives is much more important to the public, and its police force, than keeping journalists happy with a stream of information requests. But the principle of operating within the law is exactly the same: Cutting corners with sloppy detective work, outside the recognised investigative framework, will lead to some perpetrators either not being caught (the mistakes by NYP at the outset of the Claudia Lawrence case is a classic and most tragic example), or being acquitted at court if they are arrested and charged.
Police Reform Act (PRA)
Enshrined in the Act at Section 22 is the Independent Police Complaint Commission’s Statututory Guidance. Which is, effectively, a comprehensive manual setting out how complaints against police officers should be handled by the forces by whom they are employed. The person ultimately responsible for ensuring NYP compliance with the law, guidance and police regulations is Chief Constable Jones. In the terms of the Act and Guidance he is known as the ‘Appropriate Authority’. He is, quite rightly, allowed to delegate some of his powers as it would be impossible for a police chief to be embroiled in the day to day minutiae of hundreds of complaints against his officers at any one time.
But here’s the rub: Jones has selected as his delegate an officer who has shown clearly that he is not at all familiar with Statutory Guidance and, even if he was, would not feel at all bound by it. Former Leeds Drug Squad ‘hard man’ DI Steve Fincham‘s view, on all the evidence I have seen, is that the Police Reform Act and Statutory Guidance might apply to other forces when dealing with the public, but not to NYP. Why should it? It’s just another law, amongst many, to flout as and when it suits.
Jones has been subject to thirteen complaints since he took up the post in 2013. Only two were recorded and investigated. The outcomes, in both cases, were that the complaints were not substantiated. NYP did not fully comply with a FOIA request in terms of disclosing the nature of the complaints (read here). Two of the complaints have been made against Jones since the publication of the FOIA outcome. They are both, presently, subject to non-recording appeals to the IPCC.
Civil Procedure Rules
Civil Court Procedure Rules (CPR) are taken very seriously by the courts and, generally, most of the lawyers practising there. So they should. High Court judges, with greater powers than a chief constable, take a very dim view of breaches of the precisely laid out legal framework – and sanction accordingly. But Jones’ North Yorkshire Police appear unconcerned by such issues and appear to regard CPR as merely a rough guide to civil litigation that applies to everyone else but not to them. Why should it? They are above the law.
Accounts and Audit (England) Regulations
The procedure for public inspection of accounts for a larger relevant body, mentioned in Regulation 22, is that it must make the documents mentioned in that regulation available for public inspection for 20 working days. North Yorkshire Police are such a body, but do not feel bound by the Regulations.
Not just unbound, but prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to avoid compliance. In August, 2015 it was agreed, in writing, with NYP’s Chief Financial Officer, Jane Palmer, that certain invoices would be disclosed to me via pdf files carried by email, rather than visit NYP HQ in person (a 140 mile, 3 hour round trip) and pay for them to be photocopied. Almost a year later – and amidst much correspondence and two formal complaints I am still waiting. Those invoices that are being unlawfully withheld unsurprisingly concern Operations Rome and Hyson.
Police Act (Code of Ethics)
In 2014, and pursuant to S39A (5) of the Police Act 1996 (amended by S124 of the Anti Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act, 2014), the College of Policing introduced a Code of Ethics.
The public relations narrative from NYP is they they are taking every reasonable step to embed the Code Of Ethics into all operations within the force. Indeed, every email received from NYP includes the message “Committed to the Code of Ethics“.
But, setting apart the lengthy, routine and serious breaches of statute, guidance and regulations, NYP have, on the face of the extensive evidence I have collected, no interest whatsoever in complying with either the Ethics Code, or Nolan Priciples, or Standards of Professional Behaviour. This is a police force that has had all its own way, without any form of worthwhile scrutiny or oversight, since time immemorial.
Here are just some examples that involve four very senior officers, and their complete disregard for any standards that one might associate with those in public life, let alone a Policing Code of Ethics.
(i) Many more emails than not remain unacknowledged, let alone answered. The two worst offenders in my own experience are Head of NYP’s Professional Standards Department, Superintendent Maria Taylor and Press/Communications Officer, Greig Tindall. Which, by any measure, is extraordinary: The department head charged with upholding high ethical standards of all other officers in the force – and a Communications Officer who doesn’t communicate very well, if at all – both routinely place themselves outside the Code of Ethics.
(ii) There is a strong likelihood that if a response is eventually received from a senior officer, after being prompted, then it may be sent simply with the intention to obfuscate or deceive. That is the documented experience of my direct contact with the aforementioned Jane Palmer and Force Solicitor, Jane Wintermeyer. That may well be how they view their respective roles or, indeed, how they are instructed to respond by their masters, but it doesn’t sit well within an ethical or professional framework.
The two Janes are both, presently, the subject of ongoing misconduct complaints. Apologies have been received from both of them, but that is not the remedy now sought. The issues at stake require much stronger action from the force. But instead of dealing with the core issues and moving on, the drive to cover up misdemeanours of senior officers in North Yorkshire Police is all-pervading and very much extends to Mrs Mulligan’s own PCC office.
David Jones has recently been seconded to the equally shambolic South Yorkshire Police: Ostensibly, to temporarily replace his former Greater Manchester Police colleague, David Crompton, as a pair of ‘clean hands’.
Now, the Police and Crime Commissioner for South Yorkshire, Dr Alan Billings, must decide whether he has simply replaced one David, albeit on an interim basis, with another David who is a copper out of the same flawed mould.
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Page last updated Tuesday 7th June, 2016 at 2135hrs
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Photo credits: NYP, NYPCC, SYPCC, Liverpool Echo
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